For many people, hitting the big 5-0 means an opportunity to reflect back and look forward. Sometimes there are regrets about bad choices and missed opportunities, other times it’s about celebrating a career, family and wonderful times of laughter love of fulfilment.
For musical polymath Richie Kotzen, the occasion of the commemoration of five decades on planet earth was an opportunity to not only release a new solo album full of masterful, melodic musical compositions, but to add to is already impressive repertoire of recorded work and do a little compositional housecleaning along the way.
Because, ladies and gentlemen of the musical persuasion, Kotzen’s new album is a veritable library unto itself, comprising 50 songs, across multiple CDs, and aptly titled 50 For 50. It was released on Kotzen’s own label, Headroom-Inc, on Feb. 3. All 50 songs are previously unreleased, although only a dozen or so are brand new. Some are completed songs from past recording sessions that were never released, while many others were incomplete compositions and recordings that Kotzen felt were worthy of finishing and releasing to the world.
“I had initially about 10 or 12 songs that were finished and ready to be mastered to be on a new album. And then I realized I had maybe four or five others that were finished many, many years ago, and those songs were already mastered but I never released them, and I don’t know why. They just sat on my hard drive, some of them for over 10 years, So, now I have 15 or so songs ready to go. And I was on tour in Europe with my band and we were doing a festivals tour and for some reason I went back and was listening to some of this stuff and also realized that I had all these pieces that I never finished, and some of them were really close to being finished. I had the lyrics done, or a guide vocal on some of them, and others maybe just had keyboards and a drum track. When I got home, I decided to finish this music that is just sitting there incomplete. I said to myself that when I get to the point where I have 50 songs done, I am going to stop and that’s going to be my record,” said Kotzen, who over his varied and prolific career has released nearly two dozen albums of his own, as well as recorded and toured as a member of Poison, Mr. Big and most recently, is a member of the progressive rock supergroup The Winery Dogs alongside Billy Sheehan and Mike Portnoy.
“One cool thing that also started to happen was that as I was finishing some of these things, I would get ideas for new stuff. For example, one night I was sitting in the bedroom talking to my wife and I was strumming an acoustic guitar and said, ‘I gotta go down stairs, I have this idea,’ and I recorded what became the song Innocuous, which is the last song on the first record of the new album. Another time I was working on something and I started singing this melody and went downstairs to work on it and that became Black Mark, which was a brand new song. Living the Dream happened that way too. So, it turned into this bulk of creativity for three months where if I wasn’t finishing something that I started years ago, I was recording something that I had just written 10 minutes ago. It was kind of exciting.
“The oldest compositions would be More Than This and another song called Already Scarred. I want to say they were done somewhere in the very, very early 2000s. Some of these songs I don’t even have the masters too, meaning the multi-track tapes, I just have the final mix.”
And it was also an interesting journey back in time, where Kotzen was able to relive the creative output of the artist as a younger man.
“There is a song called Play the Field, and I wrote that song with a friend of mine and we recorded it in this old studio that I had up in North Hollywood. And I remembered we did that there and my playing on that song sounds so different than what I play like now. I was using a whammy pedal which is something I don’t remember even having. All of a sudden I am listening to this stuff and saying, ‘wow, I don’t ever recall using a whammy pedal,’” he said with a chuckle.
Interestingly, the project itself came well before the idea of releasing a packaged that coincided with Kotzen’s 50th birthday, which was on Feb. 3.
“The purpose for me was to clean out my hard drive and finish this music. I didn’t want something to happen where this music was never brought to life. So, songs like Mountains and When God Made You and many others, they’ve been sitting around whether in my head or on a hard drive, in broken pieces. And I thought, I have the time, I was off the road for three months, let me at least listen to them and see if I can finish them. The point is, I could have kept going. I didn’t have to stop at 50 because there’s still another huge amount of material sitting down there in the studio on various hard drives that I could go in and develop,” he explained.
“But I said, ‘when I get to 50, I will stop,’ and it just so happens that I am turning 50 and it was obvious to release it on my 50th birthday. There’s no deep meaning behind it other than let me just finish some of this material stopping when I get to 50 because that’s a nice number and I happen to be turning 50 years old. If I could pull it off, then we will release the record. And the other thing is, I didn’t really mention anything about the record until I knew I was going to hit my mark. I didn’t want to announce that I was making this record and then suddenly December comes around and I only have 36 songs that I like. You know what I mean? I have to like what I am doing before I release it. And you have to remember as I said before, that 15 of these songs were already done. That would have been the record had I not had this desire to go and finish the remaining 35 songs.”
Kotzen said that the most stressful aspect of releasing this compendium of excellent music had nothing to do with the songs, but with many of the ancillary practical and technical aspects of releasing such an epic work of creativity.
“I had all these little things that made me lose sleep and none of it was recording or writing the music. It was like, oh my God, I’ve got to master 50 songs, and then there was the production of physical copies. It’s so expensive to print CDs and making sure there were no mistakes. I had to listen to everything, which is torturous for me, because once I write it, I don’t really need to hear it again. So, I had to keep double checking, and oh there was a misprint on one of the titles, things like that: that was kind of the maddening stuff. The making of the music is always quite effortless for me. It’s the other stuff that happens afterwards where it gets stressful for me,” he said.
50 For 50 is, in part, a legacy project, in that it gives listeners a sense of Kotzen’s progression as a songwriter, guitarist, vocalist and producer over his more than 30-year career. It is also a celebration of creative freedom, unhindered by expectations of others and unencumbered by interference from outsides, including label management.
“Since I got myself in the position where I can have 100 per cent creative control of what I am doing, life is great, it’s just fantastic. I was very young [19] when I got signed to Interscope Records and then I got resigned to Geffen. Arguably I had a lot of talent back then, I had a vision of what I wanted to do with my music and it was nothing buy f***ing roadblocks, one thing after another, with label people talking about things that had nothing to do with music. Weird things about marketing and really dumb stuff. And I’ve got to say, thankfully I was able to build a fan base over the years and when the internet came along, suddenly I had a direct way to release the songs to anyone who wanted to hear them without some kind of weird filter in front of me,” he explained.
“I love that I can just write what I write and then when I feel I have something interesting I can share it; I can put it out there. If it’s not a record, maybe it’s one song. I wrote this song called Venom [released early in 2019], It’s kind of cool, I am going to make a video and just put it up. It’s not part of the record, but its something that I did that I thought was kind of fun and I enjoyed doing it. I liked the song, put it out there and I don’t have to answer to anyone, and God isn’t that a beautiful thing? And it was a fight to get to that position in my career. It took a lot of time and a lot of disappointments along the way and a lot of people telling me no. And had I listened, had I been more receptive to what the major labels wanted me to do, maybe I would be a superstar or maybe I would be working in a carpet store, because maybe I would have had nothing of substance.”
Getting even more reflective, Kotzen switched to talking about the future and how 50 For 50 may indeed be as much a psychological watershed as it is a creative one.
“You said something earlier that sparked a thought. There is something with me now, especially after putting this record out and finishing off all this material, which I think was important. I have this very interesting feeling now, it’s a very peaceful sense of calm, creatively, and when I look at my life, I feel like I have presented myself at the best of what I can do. I am not saying that I am a better guitar player than anyone, or a stronger singer than anyone, but I am saying that when it comes to me as an artist, at this point I’ve shown myself at what I consider to be my best and how I want to be shown. So, if I never make another record again, as I feel today, who cares? I have already done what I think I was supposed to do,” he said.
“I am not saying I won’t make another record – I probably will, because what I am going to do is get an idea for a song at some point and record it. But I don’t care as much about it. I still want to be a good person, I still want to develop, I want to evolve, and I want to learn new things, of course. But as it relates to this one specific aspect of my life, that’s kind of how I feel. And it’s a positive thing.”
Although the names of some of the bands and artists he has worked with come to the fore on any biographical entry of Kotzen, it must be re-asserted that these were very brief excursions early on in his prolific career. Kotzen fans, more generally, come to his music organically because they like what they hear and are enthusiastic about hearing what comes next. His time in Winery Dogs is simply reminding many rock fans of his talent and pedigree and exposing many new fans to his creative dynamism and dexterity as a solo artist.
“You have to remember that I have been making records under my own name since 1989. There are people that have been listening to my music long before I joined Poison [1991 to 1993], before I played with Stanley Clarke [early 2000s]. When I play my own shows, fans are singing the lyrics to my songs, so in terms of who my fans are I think there’s an element of musicians from back in the early day – the guitar playing crowd. I think there is a large demographic of people who just like the songs, because that’s what they’re listening to. I have seen people tattooing my lyrics on themselves for example, which is interesting. For me, yes, I play the guitar, yes, I sing, but really the reason I have any kind of career is because I have the songs.”
As for The Winery Dogs, Kotzen said he Sheehan and Portnoy stay in regular contact and that there are preliminary talks of recording another album.
“We did a wonderful tour of North America last May and we discussed reconvening a couple of times this year. What we would like to do, and I think that this will probably happen, is we will probably get together two or three times throughout the course of the year and throw some ideas around and see who’s got what. And maybe we put something out at some point next year,” he said.
“The caveat for me is I don’t want to do it the way so many other albums happen. In the old days we’d be like, ‘okay, we’re putting an album out for Christmas.’ And then you’re be jammed up hoping to get the thing done in time, hoping you’ve got enough great songs. I don’t want to do that. I want to write at our leisure and then once we all think that we’ve got 10 really strong songs, then announce we’re putting a record out. That’s really how I would like to approach it.”
In the interim Kotzen will be playing a number of dates in the U.S. in June and July before heading overseas. For more information on tour dates, 50 For 50 and more, visit www.richiekotzen.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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